| But how then is it that we perceive an ordered flow of events from future
state to past state? Why, to be flippant, is Tuesday, October 8,
1958 not followed by Friday, November 9, 1989, or Monday, July 10,
663? The answer, I feel, lies in the word perceive.
Certainly, both future and past, as states, potential domains, are
contained within the present: all possible events await selection, and are
mathematically equally likely. What selects these events and parades
them before us in the temporal order we understand of future to present to
past, in a continuous and ordered flow, must be nothing other than human
consciousness. Consciousness itself may be nothing more than a veil
that filters future from present to past, that shuts out the inconceivable
anarchy of all possible events and reduces it to our familiar linear time
sense.
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 If,
then, the present is a function of our consciousness, therefore the past
must also, in a sense, be a figment of our imaginations. By
selecting an order for events, we select therefore also the order in which
they pass from present state to past state.
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| I have this dread that afflicts me in the dead of night: it is that
somehow, we have lost the power to generate new mythologies for a
technological age. We are withdrawing into another age's mythotypes,
an age where the issues were so much simpler, clearly defined, and could
be solved with one stroke of a sword called something like Durththane.
We have created a comfortable, sanitized pseudofeudal world of trolls and
orcs and mages and swords and sorcery, big breasted women in scanty armour
and dungeonmasters; a world where evil is a host of angry goblins
threatening to take over Hobbitland and not starvation in the Horn of
Africa, child slavery in Filipino sweatshops, Colombian drug squirarchs,
unbridled free market forces, secret police, the destruction of the
ozone layer, child pornography, snuff videos, the death of the whales, and
the desecration of the rain forests.
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Where is the mythic archetype who will save us from ecological
catastrophe, or credit card debt? Where are the Sagas and Eddas of
the Great Cities? Where are our Cuchulains and Rolands and Arthurs?
Why do we turn back to these simplistic heroes of simplistic days, when
black was black and white biological washing-powder white?
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Where are the Translators who can shape our dreams and dreads, our
hopes and fears, into the heroes and villains of the Oil Age?
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| —Ian McDonald, King of Morning, Queen of Day |